President William Lai (賴清德) on Tuesday last week said that “Taiwan would absolutely not sign a cross-strait peace accord,” underlining that peace should be achieved from a position of strength.
The president made the address at a meeting with community-based groups committed to civil defense, a day ahead of the Presidential Office’s first Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee meeting.
“We must rely on our own strength to achieve peace. Peace based on a piece of paper is not reliable,” Lai said.
In 1995 and 2008, then-Chinese presidents Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) made major statements in which they mentioned signing a peace accord with Taiwan. However, they said that any negotiations would have to take place under the precondition of the “one China principle,” which denies the existence of the Republic of China (ROC) and claims that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. China’s insistence on this prerequisite has not changed since.
The experience of Xinjiang and Tibet are instructive. In 1949, Xinjiang reached an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after previously being mostly under the control of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). In 1951, Tibet signed a seven-point “peace treaty” with the CCP, which pledged to respect Tibet’s autonomy. Xinjiang and Tibet were then occupied by the People’s Liberation Army under the name of “liberation.” Those peace agreements were used by China to justify its invasions and to consolidate its genocidal domination of those territories.
As for the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy for at least 50 years, China has invalided that treaty and abandoned its “one-country, two systems” pledge to turn it into a territory under full authoritarian rule.
In 2011, then president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) also expressed an intention to engage in political talks and sign a peace accord with China. This was included into the KMT’s party platform in 2016, under the premise that the sovereignty of the ROC and Taiwan’s dignity would not be compromised. However, the KMT had already negotiated two peace agreements with the CCP, the “Double Tenth Agreement” of 1945 and an eight-article “domestic peace agreement” designed to bring about the KMT’s surrender to the CCP — the latter was never signed. These agreements were followed by the loss of China and the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan.
Fortunately, nothing came of Ma’s proposal, which faced massive objections from the public. However, China has never renounced its basic policy of pressuring Taiwan to accept unification.
The international community, especially democratic allies and like-minded states, have condemned Russia for breaking the 1994 “Memorandum on Security Assurance” to launch a military invasion of Ukraine. They have also increasingly called for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. It is important to make clear what kind of cross-strait peace and “status quo” Taiwanese desire to avoid being strung along by China’s rhetoric, which would risk Taiwan’s sovereignty and be tantamount to conceding that Taiwan is part of China.
The Lai administration is a minority government facing legislative stalemates and constraints from pro-China opposition parties. These parties have hindered attempts to increase the defense budget, and impeded defense mobilization and deployment. This can be seen as “proxy war,” with China attempting to pressure Taiwan to compromise on its “peaceful reunification” ambitions.
Lai’s statement that peace must be based on strength has clarified that Taiwan is seeking peace based on the preconditions of safeguarding Taiwan’s autonomy and dignity. It is a declaration of the public’s determination to safeguard their national sovereignty that should be heard domestically and internationally.
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